first large-scale CC licensing of scientific papers

University of California and Springer have signed an
agreement to publish as Open Access (Creative Commons
by-nc).

This is huge news, I personally wonder how UC managed to achieve
that. But nevertheless this is undeniably a precedent, which other
research institution should use to reach similar agreements.

The currently publishing situation for scientific papers is on
the average terrible, with (at least in Italy) research
institutions being strangled by the yearly subscriptions fees to
digital libraries. The subscriptions are so bad that the year you
stop paying them you loose access entirely, basically admitting
that you have wasted all the past year payments.

At least CC by-nc will create material that in the future can be
collected independently and made available by each institution.